UIT Authors

Jean Laplanche was described by Radical Philosophy as “the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day.” Studying philosophy under Hyppolite, Bachelard, and Merleau-Ponty, he became an active member of the French Resistance under the Vichy regime. Under the influence (and treatment) of Jacques Lacan, Laplanche came to earn a doctorate in medicine and was certified as a psychoanalyst. He eventually broke ties with Lacan and began regularly publishing influential contributions to psychoanalytic theory, his first volume appearing in 1961. In 1967 he published, with his colleague J.-B. Pontalis, the celebrated encyclopaedia The Language of Psychoanalysis. Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France, emeritus professor and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Université de Paris VII, and assistant professor at the Sorbonne, he also oversaw, as scientific director, the translation of Freud’s complete oeuvre into French for the Presses Universitaires de France.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis studied philosophy, served on the editorial board of Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes and became a psychoanalyst. His analyst was Jacques Lacan, from whose school he separated early in the 60s. With Jean Laplanche, he wrote the authoritative Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, edited the Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse (1970-1994) and, at Gallimard, was responsible for publishing much of the best French psychoanalytic work.